The Price of Innocence (26 page)

‘Searching his room might go easier if he’s
not
here.’

‘Yeah, but guys get really ticked off when forced to watch you toss their stuff. Ticked-off guys say things they shouldn’t say and without waiting for a lawyer. I want him here. If he doesn’t show up for the chow line, we’ll go ahead without him. It’s only another ten minutes.’

‘OK.’ Angela often got antsy about working overtime. She didn’t like her son to have too many unsupervised hours after school let out, worried about what that might lead to. They had both seen how the guys in handcuffs seemed to get younger every year. He covered her hand with his.

‘There he is,’ Angela said, gesturing with the cup.

‘Don’t—’

‘It didn’t spill.’

He examined the carpet to be sure, but then turned his head to watch ex-convict Terry Beltran approach the Calgary halfway house on East Forty-Ninth. The man’s history didn’t quite match his description. He had no more than average musculature and weight. He had only one tattoo and the sleeve of his shirt covered it. His short hair and trimmed goatee could look either sinister or mischievous, depending on the clothing he wore. Put him in a shirt and tie and he could be a banker with a maverick streak. Today he strode along in a very average pair of jeans and an oversized football jersey, not particularly intimidating until you added the knit cap and the irritated way he swung his arms. Then he became someone you would cross the street to avoid.

‘Let’s go,’ Frank said. He and Angela exited their vehicle, Angela taking her cup with her, so at least he didn’t have to worry about her setting it on the floor and then knocking it over upon re-entry. Behind them, two guys emerged from a marked unit to join in.

Beltran saw them, had seen them the moment Frank touched the door handle, and bolted – but not away. Instead, he turned and ran up the sagging wooden steps into the house.

‘Damn,’ Frank sighed.

Angela dropped her cup in the middle of East Forty-ninth and launched herself toward the house. She and Frank took the steps in unison, and he thought the combined pounding would rip off the entire porch. But the house had withstood plenty of pursuing cops over the years and barely quivered.

Frank could see Beltran’s feet disappearing up the top of the stairs as he yanked open the screen door, which had swung shut behind their felon. A skinny, middle-aged black woman stood behind a heavy reception desk and gave them a look which would have stopped a bullet train, but momentum kept Frank going. He slowed only long enough to shout ‘Police! Warrant!’ before his foot hit the first step. Somewhere on the second floor, a door banged.

Beltran had gone to the right, right, as they came through the screen door? ‘Did he go—’ Frank asked Angela, or at least began to ask Angela. But when their feet, still in unison, hit the seventh or eighth step, the entire house exploded into a white heat of light and sound, and he felt himself falling backward, falling while knowing that eventually his head and the rest of his body would come into contact with something hard and it would not be pleasant, yet unable to stop his mental debate as to whether Beltran had turned to the right or the left.

T
hey sat at her kitchen table, the polished oak slab having been the scene of many a confession over the years. Theresa had learned a lot while seated on one of the four striped cushions: that her husband had lost his job for sleeping with the boss’s wife, that Rachael had developed a crush on Matt Devereau in her algebra class, and that there is no good way to tell a sixteen-year-old that her parents are splitting up.

Now she waited to learn whether or not the man she had fallen for had once been a party to drug dealing, fraud and manslaughter.

‘So you were Bean,’ she prompted after blowing the steam from her teacup. Brewing a cup had given her heart rate and other bodily indicators time to slow down from the too-brief make-out session in the hallway. She hadn’t wanted to stop. Even now, she felt willing to ignore everything she had learned about crystal meth and explosions and dead students just to get his arms around her again. But she had to know the truth before going any further. She had an obligation to report a crime, though the statute of limitations on the drug charges would have run out by now, surely. And as long as the death had been accidental … maybe it had something to do with pride. She would not love a man who lied to her. Not again.

‘Yeah, I was Bean,’ he said, finally turning his gaze up from the table’s surface. The fact didn’t come as a surprise, but the way it made her feel as if her heart had slid five inches down her spine did. ‘Look, I’ll – I’ll tell you everything, but you can’t tell anyone else. Not your boss, not the police, especially not your cousin.’

‘How did you know Frank Patrick is my cousin?’

‘It said so in the article about Marty’s death.’

‘Oh.’ The media did mention the fact every so often, either because they found it suspicious and indicative of some Vast Government Conspiracy against innocent civilians, or because they simply thought it was cute. ‘I’m not trying to get you in trouble, David. I know it was twenty-five years ago.’

‘It’s not for me, it’s for my kids. I have to protect them.’ He leaned forward, blue eyes still shocking in the intensity of their color. ‘My ex-wife comes up for parole next month. I would really like to keep her in jail – not to be vindictive, but it would solve the whole question of whether or not she’s entitled to custody. But I have to assume she’ll be released, at least until she violates her parole by contacting that kid again, and I know she will; she’ll probably stop at the first pay phone outside the prison—’

‘David.’

‘Sorry. I mean, she’s sure to get visitation rights and there’s a good chance a judge will give her custody. Her parents will give her a place to live and her lawyer – she’s got a good lawyer – will harp on details like Anthony flunking English and Jake getting suspended for three days for using a cell phone in class and that concussion he had last fall, even though I bought him a helmet for the skateboard but he won’t wear it because it’s not cool. I took it away after that until he promised to but I think sometimes when I’m not home—’

‘David.’ She put one hand on his wrist, risking the disruption to her emotions that the physical contact brought on. ‘No one’s going to give custody to a parent who just got out of jail.’

‘They might if the other parent produced and sold drugs that caused the death of a kid.’

This harsh reality settled over them. Now she understood why he always seemed to walk with his shoulders pressed down – not to downplay his height but because he felt the weight of his children’s future on them.

She put her hand over his, and again felt that rush of blood from the contact. Despite that, she would not promise to keep a secret from Frank. ‘Your crime occurred twenty-five years ago. Hers was three.’

‘In the eyes of a lot of people, hers wasn’t much of a crime.’

She didn’t know what to say to that, and fudged some more. ‘I already know most of what occurred twenty-five years ago. But if anything is going to …
happen
between us, I need to hear it from you, David.’

He hesitated so long she thought he might refuse, and had time to ponder what she should do if he did. Could she really blame him for placing his kids above some new squeeze? Did she care? Could she, in good conscience, bed him anyway? After all, who was the dead Joe McClurg to her?

But what if it
did
have something to do with why Marty Davis had bled out next to her car?

What if it didn’t?

‘Yeah,’ David said again. ‘I was Bean.’

She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, for fear he would stop.

‘As in bean counter,’ he went on. ‘DaVinci loved to hand out nicknames, like we were all Russian spies or something.’

Or so that twenty-five years later, Ken Bilecki couldn’t remember Madison’s real name, only his assigned tag. DaVinci seemed to be a guy who thought ahead.

‘I set up two accounts for us, one at Ameritrust and one at Ohio Savings. We used the business account to pay the chemical supply companies, and our profits went into the other one, the checking account, so DaVinci could pay the rent and the other expenses. We’d all have to buy cold pills, spreading ourselves over every suburb down to Akron so that none of us went into the same store twice in six months. He kept track.’

‘I’ll bet he did.’ She sipped the hot liquid. Theresa drank coffee for caffeine, but tea for comfort. ‘Where is DaVinci now?’

‘No idea.’ He looked her straight in the eyes when he said it, too. But then, he’d been looking her in the eyes since they’d met, when he told her he knew Marty Davis through his wife’s case and had never heard of Doc.

‘It sounds like he ran your lives for about a year, and you have no idea what his real name is?’

‘He ran the business, not our lives. All I had to do was place the orders, write out the checks and buy Sudafed once in a while. I had nothing to do with cooking or selling the drugs. I’m not making an excuse, Theresa, I’m not saying I’m any less guilty than Marty or Lily. But DaVinci was good at keeping us separate, at assigning us only the tasks we needed to do. I never touched the meth, never took it, never sold it. I don’t blame you if you don’t believe that, but it’s true.’

She did believe him, but only on that point. ‘Didn’t you all live together?’

‘In the same building, not the same rooms. I had my own unit. Marty and Lily shared one, but otherwise we were separate. They were only converted hotel rooms, not big.’

‘So you committed felony crimes with these people for, what, a year or two? And you never knew your boss’s real name.’

‘I never asked. I didn’t ask about a lot of things. It seemed safer that way.’

She would not have believed this, except that Ken Bilecki, who had been so in love with the entire operation, had not known David’s name. She described him, and David quickly nodded.

‘I think I know who you mean. Bug.’

Bug. What else? ‘Because he picked at the imaginary insects he felt running underneath his skin? That’s common in meth addicts.’

‘No, because he’d bug you to death about every little thing, especially about our … business. Hyperactive. It’s a wonder he stayed in school as long as he did – he only went to class to find more customers.’

‘He was your salesman, Marty the enforcer, and Lily the mule.’

He looked at her with a pain in his face that could break her heart if she let it get close enough. ‘Why do you want to know all this, Theresa?’

‘I don’t
want
to. But Marty is dead, and there may be a problem with Lily.’

This seemed to perplex him. ‘I thought you said she overdosed.’

‘Not exactly.’ She summed up what Oliver had told her, in extremely general terms. She should not be sharing such information with someone outside the M.E.’s office, but she had to make him see that his situation might be more than merely embarrassing. It might be dangerous. If Lily had been murdered, she was the second from their little circle of six inside the past week. David Madison might know who had killed Marty Davis, and surely it would be better for him to reveal that information through her than to be hauled into police headquarters and questioned. She had to make him see that.

Though it wasn’t her job to interrogate suspects, she had watched her cousin do it. She tried a more open-ended question. ‘Tell me about the fire.’

He sighed, coughed. She pushed the teacup toward him as he explained about the meth lab in the old hotel kitchen. His account matched Ken Bilecki’s in every respect. However, David had entered it only twice – once to see the original set-up, and then when it caught on fire.

‘We’d get in through the service entrance at the back of the building. If we walked through the old restaurant to get to it, it would be too easy to be noticed by other tenants if they happened to be in the lobby. This also made it easier to unload supplies from the back parking lot.’

‘I thought you didn’t work in the lab.’

He frowned at this show of mistrust. ‘I didn’t. But I helped set up the equipment the first time. It required a lot of stuff. Anyway, I never went near the kitchen again until – that night. I came back from class – Economics of the Public Sector – about seven thirty. I came in through the front door that everyone used, started to go to the elevator and heard this
boom
. Like, loud but muffled, you know? I had no idea what it was.’

So many years later, he still shuddered at the thought.

‘I could smell the meth, but that was not new. It had gotten into the ancient carpeting and wallpaper in the lobby until it always smelled of meth – at least I thought so, but it could have been my guilty conscience. All the tenants were college kids and either didn’t know what it was, or did and knew better than to get involved.

‘I stood there for a second or two, hoping it might be a hot water heater or a gas line or somebody shooting at somebody, anything but the meth blowing up. I knew the chemicals were volatile, I saw all the warnings that came with the invoices. So I went back out again, down the alley to the back of the building. We used the service entrance. I had a key. DaVinci had changed the locks so we could use it.’

‘Didn’t the landlord—’ She stopped. He hadn’t noticed a meth lab in the kitchen; why would he notice a changed lock?

‘He lived in Youngstown, I think, and never came around. As soon as I got inside, I could see the flames through the kitchen door and the smoke practically pushed me back out. I remember dropping my books and pulling my shirt up to hold over my mouth and nose. I just wanted to check the kitchen, I figured someone had to be there. Even without chemistry courses I didn’t think stuff blew up by itself. My eyes watered from the smoke, but I could see him.’

Theresa took a breath. ‘Joe McClurg?’

‘I didn’t know who it was. I mean – I couldn’t tell. It was on fire.
He
was on fire.’

And this very tall, very strong man shuddered again. She fought the urge to put her arms around him, lest she interrupt the flow of words. He seemed to have gotten past concern about his custody case or his job or anything else; she wondered if he had ever spoken of it to another living soul in the past twenty-five years.